Gibraltar of the North

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This article is about the nickname as used to describe Luxembourg City. Less commonly, Sveaborg is known by the same epithet.

The 'Gibraltar of the North' (French: Gibraltar du Nord, German: Gibraltar des Nordens) is an historical nickname for Luxembourg City, the capital of Luxembourg. It refers to the city's coveted former fortifications, and the fortress' importance to the control of the Left Bank of the Rhine and the approaches between France and Germany. This domination was thought to be comparable to the dominance of the western Mediterranean Sea that the United Kingdom gained from the fortress of Gibraltar, and the unbowed resistance that the Gibraltar garrison offered to Spanish attempts to reclaim it.

The fortifications were built gradually over nine centuries, from soon after the city's foundation in the tenth century until 1867. By the end of the Renaissance, Luxembourg was one of Europe's strongest fortifications, but it was a period of great construction activity in the seventeenth and eigteenth centuries that gave Luxembourg its fearsome reputation. In this period, successive Spanish, French, and Austrian occupations gave way to further augmentations.

In the French Revolutionary Wars, the city held out against French blockade and siege for seven months, before the garrison surrendered, with the walls unbreached, on 7 June 1795.^[1] This led the French politician and engineer Lazare Carnot to call Luxembourg "the best [fortress] in the world, except Gibraltar".^[2]

The city's paramount importance to the Franco-German frontier led to the 1866 Luxembourg Crisis, almost leading to France and Prussia going to war over possession of the German Confederation's main western fortress. The 1867 Treaty of London demanded the demolition of Luxembourg's fortress, and the placement of Luxembourg in perpetual neutrality.